Enhancement of cell attachment on Ti6Al4V via surface modifications using pulsed laser surface melting

Abstract

The surface topography of biomedical implants made of Ti6Al4V significantly impacts cell attachment. This work aims to modify the surface topography of the Ti6Al4V surface using pulse laser surface melting (pLSM) to enhance fibroblast cell attachment. In pLSM, short laser pulses irradiate the surface resulting in localised melting and creating new features upon resolidification. Thus, surfaces are modified without the addition or removal of material. The effect of laser pulse duration and hatch spacing on the attachment of NIH3T3 fibroblast cells is examined in this study. The cells were cultured on the pLSM-textured surfaces and two control surfaces, viz., as-received and manually polished, and the results were studied after 24h of cell culture using fluorescence microscopy. pLSM-textured surfaces showed improved cell attachment compared to the control surfaces. The surface textured with a 10 μs pulse duration and 75% hatch spacing showed 395% and 91% improvement in attached cell density compared to the as-received surface and manually polished surface, respectively, because the induced feature size was comparable to the size of NIH3T3 fibroblast cells. Additionally, the periodic textures developed by pLSM resulted in a homogenous distribution of the cells across the area.